"A British medical journal has published findings saying a mistress of 16th-century French King Henry II may have died from consuming too much drinkable gold.

"When French experts dug up the remains of Diane de Poitiers last year, they found high levels of gold in her hair. Since she was not a queen and did not wear a crown, scientists said it was hard to see how jewelry could have contaminated her hair and body...."

Odds are, a sort of "drinkable gold" killed her. It was a sort of youth-preserving medical treatment that was popular at the time - for women with enough disposable income to afford the stuff.

The Associated Press isn't known for playing practical jokes on its clients, but I did a little checking, anyway. Sure enough, "drinkable gold" was a sort of elixir of youth at one time. Toxic, ineffective, and ultimately lethal: but popular.

"Take purified gold, 2 Lots; quick silver, 8 Lots. Make of them an amalgam such as goldsmiths make when trying to gild. Put this ground gold in a leather and dry the quicksilver off it...."

Don't laugh. Alchemy started out as a serious - and useful - study of materials. The basic designs of beakers, crucibles, and most other glassware you see in chemistry labs today were the work of alchemists.

Then, alchemists discovered that they could get the equivalent of government grants if they said they could turn lead into gold. Or, in this case, preserve youth.

2 comments:

Isn't quite as crazy sounding as some youth preservers people have come up with. I think the first emperor of China ended up offing himself by drinking mercury in an attempt at immortality. (That and his already high level of paranoia did not help his sanity in his last years.)

Updated (May 23, 2010) The Lemming doesn't often revisit a topic quite this exactly: but the Varma Mansion is special. Besides, Contemp...

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I'm a sixty-something married guy with six kids, four surviving, in a small central Minnesota town.

One of the kids graduated from college in December, 2008, and is helping her husband run a factory; another is a cartoonist; #3 daughter is a writer; my son is developing a digital game with #3 and #1 daughters, and has a day job.